skydiving contract; a bathroom of one's own; neglected nephew

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was among a small series of rooms with a few other people. The rooms were brick walled, kind of half-finished looking. There were some occasional incandescent bulbs lighting the rooms. The furniture was maybe just benches jutting out from the walls.

There were two women sitting on the benches along the back wall of the back room. They were getting ready for some kind of stunt, which was probably also part of an art project. They were just about ready to head off.

But a third woman off to my left stopped the women. She said the stunt the women were about to do was very dangerous. Before the women did the stunt, the woman needed to make sure the women had signed the contracts waiving any liability the third woman's organization might have.

The women, I now knew, were actually wearing their contracts. The contracts were a kind of netted bodysuit. The netting was made of a coarse, yarn-like material colored a dark red-pink. The netting made diamond patterns, the holes of which were rather wide. But the material squeezed tightly against the women's bodies. I think the women were wearing other clothing, though not much, below the netting outfits.

The contracts, I knew, would be visible when the outfits were taken off and unfurled. Between some of the holes in the netting ran some gauzy billows of material. These billows just looked like fraying or tattered material. But when the contract was laid out flat and arranged correctly, the billows took on the appearance of sheets with letters. The signature line of the contract was near the collar of these outfits.

The third woman asked the woman on the right whether she had signed her contract. Apparently the woman on the left had definitely signed her contract. I had a feeling that the woman on the right hadn't signed her contract. I was a friend to the two women. But for some reason I felt obliged to tell the third woman that the   signature line better be checked for the woman on the right. The woman on the right was angry at me. She felt betrayed.

But now both of the women were heading off to do their stunt. The stunt was probably skydiving. I went outside to watch the stunt. The sky was a kind of dim, pale blue fading into dark grey near the top, but a pale, lightless yellow at the horizon. It almost looked like a stage sky. There were some trailer-like buildings maybe twenty or thirty meters away from me. There were people scattered all about, looking up into the sky.

It now seemed like the stunt was a skydiving race. There may have been three women in the race. One of them, possibly the woman who had previously been the woman I'd "betrayed," was my co-worker SC. Another one of them may possibly have been my co-worker AW. The racers had their parachutes open and were somehow racing to see who could reach the ground first. I was cheering for SC. I felt like I looked up to SC, like I was a young girl and that SC was my lover.

At least one of the parachutists, maybe SC, was now close to the ground. My view of her/them was obscured by the trailers and the people around me, who all felt a lot taller than I. I couldn't tell who was winning or who had won the race. I was hoping SC had won. But I also didn't know whether SC's landing had been safe. I was hoping SC hadn't been injured.

Off in the distance to my left, I could see one of the women, perhaps AW, landing. It seemed like she'd had a hard landing. She had, it now seemed to me, been the third woman in the room, the one who'd asked whether the women's contracts had been signed.

The third woman, I now knew, had been so concerned about the safety of this jump. But I myself (probably as myself and not as the "young girl") had convinced the woman of the safety of the jump, and that she herself was fine to jump. But now, watching the third woman, I could see that her landing was actually really hard. I was pretty sure the landing gave the woman physical pain. I also feared that the woman had sustained some sort of injury. Now she'd blame me for the whole thing.

I looked back forward, to where I assumed SC would be landing. The space was clear, and I could see all the way to the barren, flat, stage-like horizon. But there was now sign of the parachutists. There were instead two strange devices, like giant spotlights, sending something, maybe beams of light, maybe parachutes, up into the air.

I now understood that these devices were part of a show, like a live-action version of an anime. The parachute/skydiving race was a stunt, a contest, on its own. But it was somehow integrated into this anime. There were probably a number of races. Before and between the races, the anime show took place. The show may have justified sending the racers up into the sky. But the racers in the show may have been sent up into the sky not by a plane or any other vehicle, but by their parachutes and the spotlight-like devices.

This didn't quite make sense to me. But I was kind of eager to see the anime show. I wondered what the drama would be about.

Dream #2

I was in a public restroom. Something had gotten me offended. I felt like there had been a huge crowd of people, all trying to stop me from using the restroom -- even though I didn't actually ever see anybody in the restroom.

I was in a narrow hallway, like a hallway between one section of the bathroom and another, standing (all by myself?) as if I were standing in line. Suddenly I got so frustrated by the feeling of being crowded out and having my position in the bathroom line threatened that I began walking quickly through the hallway, all the way to the end of the hallway.

I may have heard or imagined people talking about me -- or I may have simply been thinking about myself. The statements I heard or imagined were like a questioning: why I'd run off and acted so rudely toward everybody else, as if I had been suspicious of everybody else for no reason, or as if I'd thought I was better than everybody else.

I now felt kind of silly for having run off. But I was already on my way. I was looking for a toilet that nobody else would try to take from me. I ended up in front of four toilet stalls. I turned left in front of the stalls. On the wall across from the stalls there was a half-opened door. The door opened to a small room with two or three more stalls in it. I walked into the room and toward the first or second stall in the room.

But I again felt rushed or crowded out by someone -- someone I couldn't see! I quickly exited the stall and moved to the very back stall of this room. I stood in front of the toilet and began urinating into the toilet.

Dream #3

I was probably outside in a suburban neighborhood with my family. We may all have been lounging around in the middle of the street (???). We were probably at the corner of the street. The building at the corner may have been a single-family house. But it may also have been an apartment complex or some kind of office building that I'd taken as being a house.

My youngest nephew sat on the curb, playing around with something. I knelt beside him. He asked me something like, "Are you mad at me?" I told him I wasn't mad at him. He said something like, "I thought you were mad at me, because you never come to see us anymore."

I felt really bad. I may have hugged my nephew or patted him on the back. We were now in front of the house, maybe right before a screen door or in the threshold of the doorway. I explained to my nephew that the fact that I didn't visit the family's house very often didn't have anything to do with him. I tried to tell my nephew that I really loved him and thought he was a good little boy.

Beyond the doorway, in the kitchen?, there was now a lot of activity. My brother-in-law was in the kitchen, and a few little children were running around, creating a little sense of chaos. I felt like my brother-in-law was regarding me suspiciously. I didn't know why. But I felt like I should back away from my nephew.

I was now "somewhere else," talking with my brother-in-law on my cell phone. But my view was "in my family's living room" looking at some vague activity, which may have been like the phantom motions of people, of members in my family.

My brother-in-law was explaining how my youngest nephew had begun to act strangely. He was doing things like wearing a dunce cap and beating himself on the head. He was constantly criticizing himself and others in the family, being extremely severe with them morally. He was blaming everybody, including himself, by turns, for my not coming to the family's house as often as I used to.

My brother-in-law was probably telling me all this stuff to get my opinion on whether my nephew was going crazy. But it also seemed like he was blaming me for my nephew acting this way, like I'd done something bad to him -- not neglectful, but actively bad -- to make him go crazy.

I was trying to convince myself that my nephew wasn't acting strangely, that he wasn't going crazy. I also felt like I had done something bad to my nephew: not that I had done something actively bad to him, but that I had emotionally been neglectful of him. But I was trying to convince myself, again, that that really had no effect on my nephew, and that my nephew was fine.

the vanished woman; old woman charon

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom of an apartment or of a mutli-story house. The bedroom was dim and small, with dull, wood floors and a small bed that probably had a pink bedspread over it.

I was a strong, young man with olive complexion, dark hair, and a little bit of stubble on my face. I was in the bedroom with a woman who may have been beautiful, though she may have been twice my age. She may actually have been a family member, or the mother of a group of my friends who were downstairs.

I had gotten into an argument with the woman over something, possibly some crime the two of us had taken part in. I felt like the woman was going to get me in trouble by revealing something about the crime. I may have been planning to kill her to get rid of the evidence.

I traced my feet around the bed, moving clockwise around the bed from the head of the bed, down around the foot of the bed, and up just a step or two back toward the head of the bed.

The woman now stepped near the bed. She didn't know -- maybe I hadn't, either! -- that my feet had actually cut into the floor, like in cartoons. The traced area was ready to collapse. I must have had an idea of this, because I'm pretty sure I told the woman not to step any closer.

But the woman did step forward and fall through the floor. The bed, the section of floor, and the woman all vanished through the floor. I looked into the hole. I'd expected to hear a crash or something. But there was nothing. And the hole was shallow, like there was another floor only one or two meters down. Everything had really vanished!

I hurried downstairs, hoping to find the spot where the woman had landed. I met the woman's children, who were probably all about the same age as I/the young man. I don't know whether the family actually was angry at me for letting their mother die, or whether they even suspected me of being involved in it. But I was afraid they were angry. They all seemed kind of savage and capable of really harming me.

I was trying to justify what had happened to the woman. But the conversation between me and the others went to other topics. The hole in the floor, I learned, also had something to do with demons. So perhaps demons had drawn the woman to the hole in the floor. The woman was definitely in danger of demons right now, wherever she was.

Something else I learned from our conversation, which continued as we walked down a big complex of old, institution-style staircases and balconies, was that the woman had actually said something that had tempted fate, or tempted the spirits, to pull her into wherever she now was. She had something that had to do with keeping her distance from spirits, something like always staying two steps or five steps away from something.

As people -- including, now, for some reason, my grandma P -- continued to tell me this story, in an almost pitying tone of voice, I, continuing to walk down the staircase, began playing with the bannister, running my fingers along a knob of white-painted wood.

We ended up down at the bottom of the staircase, in a fluorescent-lit basement. I had expected to find the woman down here. I could even visualize her, laying wrapped up in a blanket, even cluttered on either side by stuff that had fallen with her through the hole in the floor.

Dream #2

I walked out of a living room and into a hallway, at the back of a group of older family members, probably including my mother, my grandma P, and my step-grandmother.

We had all been planning on how to take care of some older woman in our family who was having physical troubles. I had understood that I had been assigned certain tasks, and I had adapted my thoughts to the anticipation of taking care of these tasks.

But now that we were walking through the hallway, I learned that I had been assigned a whole different group of tasks. The responsibility I had accepted, even come to look forward to, was now replaced by a whole different set of responsibilities, which were things I felt could have been assigned to a child. I felt like it was being implied that I was no more than a little child.

I had only found out about these changes as they'd filtered through the conversation my relatives were having with each other. But I found out that my mother had actually been the one to make these changes. She'd made the changes, and she hadn't told me a thing!

We all ended up in a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was kind of small, narrow, and flimsy. But something about it also felt like a great library, like the Morgan Library.

The rest of my relatives had kind of dispersed, leaving just me and my mother in the room. My mom may have been trying to have a nice conversation with me. But she may also have been gloating at me, trying to needle me with the fact that she had changed plans on me without telling me anything.

I got extremely angry. Suddenly I was floating a bit above the ground. A book was also floating in front of me. Ostensibly the book was an edition of Dickens' Little Dorrit. But it was much thinner than any edition of Little Dorrit could be. And the covers and all the pages were made of some kind of backing and white fabric. The white fabric was all emroidered with quaint illustrations, giving the book the look of a folk art cushion and a child's book.

As I looked at this book, calmly entranced by its strange, Christmasy beauty, I was think/talk/yelling at my mom. I brought up some instance where a relative, possibly my grandma P, had needed her help. But some decision my mom had made had gone wrong. I yelled at my mom, "You! You really -- fucked -- it -- up!"

I knew that that would hurt my mom and get back at her for her having changed plans on me. But now that I'd done it, I felt bad. I'd gone too far. I worried that I'd permanently damaged my mom's emotions. I felt really terrible.

I was now in an SUV with some co-workers from my present job, probably including MM and SC. I was sitting in a backseat. We were driving through a quaint residential area. We drove up to a property that was fenced around with a solid, white wall of fence that had some kind of green ivy draping over it.

We stopped at the gate. It was understood that I needed to head in and hand a payment to an old woman who lived at the house. This payment was partly something I'd owed from the past. But it was almost like this payment was a kind of rite of passage, something that would make me part of my group of co-workers.

But I either didn't have the money or else was so low on money that paying the fee would really put me in trouble financially. I tried not to let on about this. But somehow SC found out. She, and probably the rest of my co-workers, were a little disappointed in me when they found out. I knew I'd be held in lower esteem because of this mistake I'd made -- not having enough money.

My co-workers, or maybe just SC, who was probably driving the car, may have handed me a twenty-dollar bill, or even a wad of twenty-dollar bills. I now had enough money to give to the old woman.

I was now standing before the door. But, where before the house had been in a kind of tight, wall-fenced place, it now stood out on some wide, sunny lawn, maybe even a wide valley.

Two old women opened the door. One woman stood tall. The other woman may have been very short, or hunched over, or even sitting in a wheelchair. She was kind of fat, very pale, very baggy-faced, with pale blue eyes and thin, white hair. She wore a peach-tan, satiny nightgown. She was the woman I was supposed to give my money to.

The woman didn't really seem concerned with my money. She was talking in a rambling manner that was uncanny and spooky. (I want to say now that it was autonomous or beyond my control -- I'm not sure why, or even what that would mean.)

The woman wanted me to stay to keep her company. She may have been offering me dinner in return. But something about the woman, the degree of her illness, made me realize that it wouldn't be good, either for me or for the woman, for me to stay with her.

I may still have wanted to stay with the woman. But I was now sitting on something like a child's tricycle combined with some (not sure what) aspect of a Radio Flyer wagon. The wagon was being pulled by a yellow and blue rope attached to the front. I was being pulled away from the house and out of the valley.

I kept trying and trying to pull myself back toward the woman. But the rope kept pulling me farther and farther away. Moving through the rolling valley, I was surprised by its vastness. I really felt like things had changed -- for the better (?). I saw a few small groups of beautiful people, mostly beautiful, little girls, playing in the valley.

Getting toward the edge of the valley I now saw that the people who were pulling the rope attached to the wagon were the co-workers who had been in the car with me, in particular SC and MM. They stood on a clear boundary of lands. The area they stood in was more like a pine forest, with trees and dusty, needle-strewn ground. I knew that my co-workers were doing what was best for me. But I still kept reaching back toward the house and the old woman.